


Late-night Scientific Discourse, With Coffee

by White Aster (white_aster)



Category: Silent Zone - Stephen Molstad
Genre: Aliens, Dialogue Heavy, M/M, Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:40:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28013331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/white_aster/pseuds/White%20Aster
Summary: Okun and Isaacs discuss what they know about the aliens' intentions, and Okun notices some things he hadn't noticed before.
Relationships: Milton Isaacs/Brackish Okun
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Late-night Scientific Discourse, With Coffee

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flowerdeluce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowerdeluce/gifts).



> I never saw the second movie, so I hoooope I did these two right? Some domestic-ey science dorks impressing each other with their brains. Set pretty soon after the end of the book.

Brackish had spent a lot of his time at Area 51 in the kitchen. It had been the social hub for long before he had arrived, a staging ground not just for food but also companionship and lively debate. Theories, experiments, arguments, insults about intelligence and academic pedigrees--all had been hashed out over the stained Formica tabletop, and that was just in the relatively short time that Brackish had been there. More than any other place in the facility, the kitchen felt like home, or as much like home as an underground bunker could. Sometimes he'd wake up in the morning sitting at the table, coffee cup in hand, his body having walked him there on autopilot before he was even fully conscious.

So, for probably sentimental reasons, Brackish had waved away suggestions of renovating the original kitchen and residential wing. A spanking new dorm and cafeteria were all ready to accomodate the additional staff he was planning to bring on, but the kitchen remained essentially untouched. A deep clean and a new coffee maker (to replace the one that leaked all over the countertop 10% of the time, despite the attentions of every engineer in the place) were all Area 51's new Director of Research had asked for. 

Said coffee maker was the reason Brackish wandered into the kitchen that night, nodding over a particularly thorny line of thought involving the aquabox, wireless energy transmission, and superconductive materials. When he looked up, he found himself sitting at the kitchen table, his usual blue coffee mug in front of him, and a slightly amused Milton Isaacs watching him from directly across the table.

"Oh, hey," Brackish said, lifting his coffee cup in salute. "Sorry, didn't see you there."

"I noticed. I said hi twice when you walked in," Isaacs said, lips quirking. "I was starting to wonder if you were sleepwalking."

"Nah, spacing out. I was just thinking."

"Yeah, same here," Isaacs said, sitting back and stretching like he'd been there awhile. He pressed a hand to the back of his neck, rolling his head from shoulder to shoulder. "Gotta admit, this job's given me a lot to think about."

Brackish would be the first to admit that he was not the best at reading people, but he thought he detected some worry under Isaac's goatee. "Anything good? Or bad, I guess."

Isaacs tilted a hand, pulling the face of a guy trying to make his thoughts line up. He tilted his chin at a pile of papers near his elbow. "I read your report today."

Brackish's first thought was _which one?_ but then he saw the [TOP SECRET] stamped all over the pages. "Oh, that one. What did you think?" Lenel and Cibatutto and the others had read his draft over for anything he'd missed, but Brackish had given a copy of the final to Isaacs, too. He figured that it would be a good refresher on all things alien for their newest staff member.

Isaacs slowly leaned forward again, elbows on the table, hands cupped around his mug. "What do you really think the aliens' intentions are?"

For some reason, that wasn't what Brackish had expected. But then he remembered how many seemingly weird tangents he'd gone off on when he'd been getting up to speed here, too. Obviously Isaacs' brain had chased down a similar rabbit hole. "Don't think we really know," he said, gesturing to the pile of report. "We don't have enough evidence one way or the other."

Isaacs waved a hand. "Yeah, yeah, I get that, but...." He looked at Brackish hard, eyes narrowing a bit. "What do you _think_? Aside from the data. Gut feeling. Do you think they have hostile intentions?"

"Gut feeling, OK...." Brackish blew out a breath, leaning back in his chair. "...I don't think hostile's really the right word. I mean, I don't think they hate us and want to exterminate us. Like I said, they don't _kill_ people. They just...study them. I mean, who knows whether the Roswell alien was feeding Wells a line of bullshit or not, but their actions actually do support its story, in some ways. They do study us. Even help us sometimes, I guess, if that's what the alien in Mexico was doing with me and the ankh. I mean, it must have been pretty obvious that I was trying to get at the guts of their propulsion systems, but instead of killing me, it just...gave me back the exact thing I needed."

Isaacs pointed a finger at him. "I don't know if we can classify that as 'help', if it did it so you could lead them to the other ship."

Brackish shrugged, taking a swallow of coffee. "Yeah, but wanting the ship back isn't hostile. They think we're primitive. Wells' alien made that pretty clear. Maybe our giant flying paperweight down there could critically malfunction and irradiate half of the state, or open up a black hole or something. Maybe they want it back so we don't tinker with it." 

Isaacs was shaking his head. "What," Brackish said, smiling slightly. "Don't buy it?"

The doctor gave his head a final emphatic shake. "If it was dangerous, why not just tell you that? It's like you said...they probably knew you had been trying to get at the aquabox. They even knew you'd been around _another one_ because there was the extra ankh, and maybe they'd found your notebook--"

Brackish sighed, head sinking to the table in mourning for his notebook. He still wasn't over the loss. 

"--so, even if they didn't know who you were, they knew what you'd seen. That you were smart, that you were trying to take things apart or put them back together. But they didn't warn you of anything."

Brackish held up his hands in surrender. "Okay. Got me there. But I still think that studying us and wanting their toys back doesn't necessarily mean they're hostile."

"Fair enough," Isaacs said, tilting a hand. "But..." He shook his head, lips pressing together.

"C'mon, spit it out." Brackish looked at him over the rim of his mug. "What's _your_ gut say?"

"It says...," Isaacs stared at the wall for a bit, eyes narrowed. "I think they're _callous_. Uncaring. In a way that goes beyond just...scientific distance. And that's what worries me, because if you don't care about someone, then how do you deal with them when it comes time for diplomacy?"

Brackish shrugged, continuing to play devil's advocate. "Maybe they don't want to be friends, but that doesn't mean they don't want to peacefully coexist."

Isaacs still didn't look like he bought it. "You know what bothers me the most?"

Brackish shook his head.

"That they've never tried to talk to us. All this time, all the abductions and research and surveillance they're doing, but they've never just tried to talk to us, as a species, or even as individuals. The abductees talk about being questioned somehow, but to me that just seems like data gathering, not an actual dialogue."

"And the Roswell alien?"

"Eh," Isaacs said, shrugging. "It talked with him, but I never got the feeling it really wanted to. And even Wells admitted that the thing thought he was beneath it. How did he describe it, like a lord talking to a peasant? Doesn't really inspire confidence in them, if their scientists think of us as inferior." He tapped a finger down on the report. "Kind of like your Tall One in Mexico. It didn't want to talk to you, or at least didn't want you to remember it. But why not? You'd have been a perfect candidate. You'd already proven that you were interested in learning from them. Instead, what did it do?"

"Wish I knew," Okun muttered. Every time he took a shower, he kept eyeing every little bump and mole, wondering if it had been there before Mexico, wondering if it was Spelman's theorized tracker.

"Exactly!" Isaacs tossed his hands up. "But we do know that it gave you back the ankh. The one thing it knew you needed, because it knew without that ankh, no functioning aquabox. Without that ankh, you might not return to the ship, or wouldn't be able to power it up, and by the way, has anyone figured out if just powering up the ship sends some kind of signal to them?"

Brackish shifted in his seat uncomfortably. "Don't know. I thought about that. And if it does, we're really, really lucky we've only ever powered it up underground, which would probably mess with the signal." _Probably. Hopefully._

"OK. I'll leave that one to you guys. But to get back to my point, what the Tall One didn't do was _openly communicate with you_. About anything. And that's what makes me nervous."

Okun furrowed his brow. "Why? It makes sense to me. I mean, it was definitely bigger than me, but that doesn't mean I couldn't have freaked out and hurt it. Maybe I had a gun or some other weapon. I could have attacked it. It makes sense to be cautious."

"It makes sense to us," Isaacs said, finger moving to point at each of them in quick succession. "But we can't assume that the aliens have the same thought patterns as we do." He took a deep breath, started to say something, then hesitated.

Brackish smiled. He could recognize a guy with an idea percolating in his brain from a mile away. "Go on. Come on, man, you would not believe the number of half-baked ideas I've heard over this table." He jabbed said tabletop with his finger pointedly. "It's what it's for. Spit it out."

Isaacs appeared to relent. "Maybe they're not talking to us not because they're afraid, but because they're _not_." 

Okun sat back again, head tilting. He thought he could see where this was going, but it would be interesting to hear Isaacs' take on it. "Okay. Lay it on me."

Isaacs sighed, fingers scratching at his goatee. "I've been thinking about...well, everything. What Wells told us about the alien's home, what it thought of us and our world, what you guys have figured out about their technology. What does that all say about their social structure, their psychology? Think about it." He leaned forward on the table, counting off on his fingers. "First, the vision that Wells' alien gave him. It was running with others, collecting food that it took back to the group. It got to eat, but others ate first, and it had to fight to get its share, even though it was the one who collected it. Now, maybe it gathered extra food out of altruism, but maybe it was more of a collectivist impulse - the group over the individual."

Brackish started nodding. Sure, he was willing to run with that.

Isaacs went on. "Let's assume that, then: a highly collectivist species, with the tall leader or leaders that the Roswell alien told Wells about. I'm not a tech guy, but it seems like that sort of social structure makes their technology make more sense." Isaacs ticked off another finger. "Think about the networked ships - they have to move in squads or fleets to even get off the ground. That's a huge weakness, in our eyes, right? The ship here, the ship in Mexico - all they have to do is get stranded alone, and end of story, they're grounded. Why would they build that weakness into their ships unless _they didn't think it was a big deal_?"

"Like you would if you were always working with a group. If you never even thought of being alone," Brackish mused quietly.

"Right!" Isaacs said, thumping a hand on the table. "In a highly collectivist society, maybe their instinct is to move together, in numbers, all the time. So they _built_ that requirement in, left it there on purpose, because why not? Ships were never supposed to be alone anyway."

Brackish just kept nodding. He'd never considered it in quite this way, but it would explain the weird drawbacks of the aquabox system. It also suggested that eventually there would be a lot more aliens incoming, which had always been a concern. A few ships doing stealthy research was one thing. Thousands of ships showing up with who knew what intentions was another.

"Third." Isaacs ticked off another finger. "The telepathy. We don't know how that works, but what if they can sense the thoughts of the others around them, all the time, like some kind of running commentary? What if that shapes their sense of what the 'self' _is_? Or what privacy means, or personal agency? What if they don't even have individual identities but have some kind of shared consciousness?" 

Brackish's nodding slowed. Not in disagreement, but just in wonder at the possibilities. "Radical."

That made Isaacs blink. "Y...yes, radical, but also incredibly alien. Imagine how different a species like that would _think_." He spread his hands. "Human history, folklore, mythology. All the stories that we humans tell each other are based on a sense of self. Individual heroes. Man against the elements, man against man, man against tyranny or oppresion, man against--"

"--the Man!" Brackish said, raising a fist and shaking it with an impish grin.

"Heh. Right." Milton grinned, obviously getting into the discussion, and Brackish temporarily lost the thread of the conversation at how that smile changed his entire face. "You see what I mean. Our assumptions about what's important in an interaction are based on an idea of individual rights and duties to others, and a highly collectivist society might not even agree with us on what those are. And if they don't have the same sense of self, if they think through a collectivist lens, then how does that affect their interactions with a completely different species?"

Okun frowned, the radicalness of the idea wearing off as he thought through the implications, about how it related to Isaacs' original point about the aliens not being afraid of them. "Would they see the other species as part of the collective or not?"

Isaacs slapped a hand down on the Formica. "That, Dr. Okun, may be the $64,000 question."

Okun frowned harder, his mind racing. "Because what would we even look like to them? If we're outside of their collective, outside their frame of reference, not...telepathically talking to them.... Would they even see us as people? Or would we be...animals? Test subjects?" He thought back to Mexico, the Tall One, the ankh. "Tools?" _And you don't talk to animals. You don't negotiate with lab rats. You don't use diplomacy on tools._

_And if you're technologically advanced enough, you're not afraid of them, either._ And the aliens certainly were technologically advanced enough. Nothing Earth-made could catch one of those ships if it didn't want to be caught. The entirety of Earth was badly outclassed, and the aliens had to know that.

Now Isaacs was nodding. "And if they don't care about us, if they're not _here_ for us, then what are they here for? Remember Wells' alien said it was interested in observing, but not just us: animals, plant life, it said. It knew it could eat our food and drink our water. And it came from a resource-strapped place, where it had to run over hot stone just to get food for the day. What does this planet look like to it, with so much biomass being produced as food? And that's not even knowing if they're interested in things like fossil fuels or uranium or god knows what else just sitting in Earth's crust. And if we _do_ have something material that they want, and if they _are_ highly collectivist...then do they have a concept of personal property? Do they have a concept of stealing? And even if they do...would that even apply to a species that's _not part of their collective_?"

Okun stared at him, coffee mug cooling between his hands. "I _really hope_ you're wrong."

"So do I," Isaacs said. He stood, with a wince. "All the fun things you get to think about now that you're director, Director."

"Hey, I prefer Doctor."

"Right." Oh, Brackish thought, there was that smile again. It spread up to his eyes, softening them with humor, and Brackish thought, very clearly, Oh no, he's cute. That realization derailed Brackish's thoughts for a long few moments. Fortunately, Isaacs walked over to the sink to wash out his cup, so he didn't notice how Brackish was staring at him like a goofball. When Isaacs turned back around, though, he was back to being solemn, with that touch of worry again.

"Hey," Brackish said, not sure what he wanted to say but wanting that smile back. "Don't let this get you down, man. I guarantee, everyone here's had those sort of gloom and doom thoughts. But that's why we're here: to make sure we're ready, you know?"

Isaacs nodded, rocking on his toes a bit. "I know." 

"And you've got some good points. I don't believe I'm saying this, but I think we need some humanities guys in here. Psychology, maybe, or...the one that's not archaeology," Brackish snapped his fingers, trying to remember. "The one with the bones and the--"

Isaacs raised an eyebrow. "Anthropology."

"Yes! That." Brackish tilted his head. "You know any anthropologists that specialize in alien civilizations?"

Oh, that got an actual, honest-to-god laugh. It wasn't long, but it was genuine, and Brackish was so busy thinking, _Wow,_ that he almost missed Isaacs' response as he pushed off from the counter and headed for the hallway. "I'll ask around. Good night, Dr. Okun."

Brackish watched him go, untying his tongue long enough to say, "Good night, Dr. Isaacs."

Once Isaacs was gone, Brackish sat nodding slowly for a long moment, then rose to dump the rest of his coffee in the sink. He should be thinking about how one found antropologists interested in alien spaceships, or worrying over the idea that the aliens would show up en masse one day to strip the Earth bare.

But mostly Brackish found himself thinking about Milton Isaacs' grin, and that laugh. _Cute. And smart. And I'm stuck down here with him._ He sighed, heading toward his room. _I'm so screwed._


End file.
